race

‘ey, aye

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all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.

the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.

ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.

ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.

ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.

ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.

ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.

ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.

ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.

but it’s so convenient. i’ll give it that.

more spectra

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In my last reflection, I mentioned the intersection of race, gender expression, and neurodiversity in my family story—qualities that all have spectra embedded in them. I didn’t touch on culture and class, which are also observable as existing on spectra.

I was shaped by aspects of Black domestic and expressive culture, but completely isolated from Black community. Likewise German immigrant culture, separated from an immigrant community that nurtured those specific traditional values. From this perspective, I’m able to observe in myself the interplay between race and ethnicity only from the margins of those spaces and states, not from the center. Blackness and whiteness are not fixed values; nor are Germanness and culturally displaced Africanness.

The family story, just in the 20th century—the people I shared a home with—starts on both sides with humble beginnings, and moves through privilege gained through luck and ingenuity. That privilege was not culturally embedded in our family—like our connection to ethnic culture and racial position relative to the dominant culture, it was only adjacent to the culture of American royalty—families who had known privilege for generations. My family was less like the Rockefellers and more like the Beverly Hillbillies with a multi-ethnic cast.

The arc of my family’s material wealth is remarkably graceful—a slow, upward curve, starting in the early part of the century, that reaches well above the median, into 10% territory, flattens in the 50s and 60s, and then draws slowly down to the bottom again in the present day. Through various circumstances and choices, the anchors that make generational transfer possible simply did not survive.

This is just a thumbnail sketch of the part of the family I was embedded within. It doesn’t take into account the Swedish immigrants and consistently lower-middle-class whites descended from earlier waves of European immigration who never accumulated anything like transferable access to the American dream. Generations of people on both sides living in the moment, poverty and privilege passing through them, neither pole of the spectrum inhabited for long.

spectra

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i grew up in a biracial household where Blackness, white passing, and whiteness were all intertwined, as a neuroqueer, bigender, autistic child with high justice sensitivity, but low hierarchy awareness. being late-diagnosed, i didn’t have names for a lot of my experiences, but looking back, it all makes perfect sense. none of the labels i’ve used are choices i’ve made. they are simply acknowledgements of what always was.